The exhibition Les circonstances sont neutres (Circumstances are neutral) begins like a journey
across a landscape without fixed points of reference, where objects are more like thresholds than answers. Nothing here is designed to reassure us: each work is a nod to tension, to a movement, to a loophole where matter, time and an unlikely biology of art meet.
The artist’s work has always drawn inspiration from the question of space – not the abstract space of surveyors, but that which surrounds and besieges us: that fluctuating fabric in which our bodies live like fragile measurements. Time surfaces through slow decantation, in a patient process of accumulation, yet also with fleeting on-the-spot events that are almost seismic in nature. And that is where art emerges here: in that interval between slowness and speed, between neutrality and drama, between accident and self-evidence.
The exhibition starts with a work entitled ‘Motor’. This age-old motor – eroded, swollen and hollowed out by time – comes from the depths of a former mine that was abandoned. It was not pulled out of oblivion to be restored but to be exhibited as it actually is. Displayed upon a low base of weathering steel, it is neither extolled nor distorted. It is simply put on show with its
weight, mass and buried story.
The work carried out here does not seek to comment. It does not respond to trends or the imperatives of meaning. It observes. It offers a conflict between form and deterioration, between the object and the time that has shaped it, between that which was its functionality and that which is now its presence.
It is an oeuvre about pure materiality, the way in which iron, oxygen, gravity and time work together to produce something other than a motor: an inhabited item, a technical ruin, a trace. There is no lesson, but just a gaze: what something has become – and perhaps what we become too.
The series ‘Papier millimétré’ (‘Graph paper’). What was originally a grid or a simple graph plan becomes, through repeated incisions from a box cutter, a slashed, vibrant – almost carnal –
surface. The images chosen as backdrops – a portrait of Harvey Weinstein, an advertisement for a padded jacket from the company The North Face, or an Olivier Mosset painting – are not icons but pretexts: they are there to undergo the action, for the mechanical neutrality of the surface to be contrasted with the murky thickness of reality. Craters, jumps and accidents are revealed in the cuts. The lines, meant to represent the rational order, turn into scars and shivers. Control fights with chaos over its share: space is put to the test by the hand, time is put to the test by gestures, the image is put to the test by its own dissolution.
This logic of simple elements that ‘stick together’ also informs other works, whether they are made up of coolant radiators transformed into optical surfaces – ‘OTS’ – or structures like in
the work ‘cubiKron’. All these works follow the same principle: matter is repeated, twisted and diffracted until it liberates unexpected density. These works, like improbable organisms, remind us that biology itself is based on the infinite recombination of units that are apparently neutral.
We could even believe in a cold form of materialism here. Yet it is, in fact, the exact opposite: each object stands like a fragile organism, vibrating with its own tissue. The artist does not seek to explain the world, but, rather, test its texture, from gravity and density to continuity and wave phenomena. Everything helps create the experience of a delicate space where the surface thickens into the world.
In the installation entitled ‘the studio’, chain mail looks like a stirring mass that could evoke the fabric of space and time, seeming to resonate with invisible flows running through it, as if it were softly vibrating from the effect of imperceptible forces.
It rests upon AA-framed structures: the iconic Butterfly chairs, reduced to their folded X frame. These minimalistic shapes evoke a lightweight skeleton or bony framework. The rigour of their geometry contrasts with the moving flexibility of the chain mail.
The whole installation serves as a metaphor. It is more than an object. It evokes the artist in the studio, waiting, available, letting any heaven-sent occurrence happen, whatever it might be. ‘Circumstances are neutral’, the exhibition title tells us. Yet everything in this exhibition is dramatic. The works do not tell stories. They unfold in a grey, neutral zone where the conditions for emergence play out discreetly. There is nothing spectacular here, but just a hand that cuts, assembles and distorts. However, density and dizziness emerge from this triviality, as if each work were not an object but an unsettled organism, a fragment of time in material form.
So the exhibition offers an experience: a space-time experience made visible and tangible, stretched between control and accident, between the rigour of a grid and the improbability of a living being. Here, art is neither narrative nor decor. It is that unlikely fabric into which the fragile self-evidence of our worldly presence is weaved.
Virgil Kohl
